Abstract
Linguists draw both typological (Dixon 1986) and morphosyntactic (Grinevald 2000) distinctions between classifiers and gender systems. However, these two systems show many functional similarities (Kilarski 2013). Canonical Gender (Corbett and Fedden 2016) is an attempt to unify the two systems. This chapter investigates the possessive classifier system in North Ambrym (Oceanic) and argues, using psycholinguistic experiments, that it is an instance of non-canonical gender as more than 50% of the nouns tested adhere to the Canonical Gender Principle (Corbett and Fedden 2016: 503). Nouns which are prototypical possessions and are closer to the core of the classifier’s semantic categories are restricted to occur with just one classifier. Nouns which are less prototypical possessions and further away from the semantic core of the classifier categories are able to be assigned different classifiers. These two underlying factors are what drives internal variation in adherence to the Canonical Gender Principle.